GameDev.net MCP: forums, tutorials and postmortems, cited

Bring GameDev.net into your AI app

1. 1Click Connect GameDev.net free. There's no sign-in, so its tools are ready at once.
2. 2All ten tools read public GameDev.net content and start on. If you only want forum answers, keep `search_site` and `get_thread` and switch off the ShaderLab tools such as `search_shaders`.
3. 3Add ContextGate to your AI app as a connector or MCP server. The steps for each app are on the Works with page.
4. 4Ask your AI app to find GameDev.net postmortems about shipping an indie game, with links, then open Activity to see the search.

Game-dev research with sources

• Search GameDev.net forums with `search_site` and read a whole thread, accepted answer included, with `get_thread`.
• Find tutorials on a technique and get citations back to the original posts.
• Read postmortems from shipped games before planning your own.
• Follow how a game-industry story developed, source by source, with `get_story`.
• Search ShaderLab projects and check how portable a shader is to Unity, Godot, three.js or WebGL.

Searches you can account for

• Switch off any GameDev.net tool; your AI app won't see it.
• Policies check each search, so a secret left in code you paste into a question can be blocked.
• Activity records every GameDev.net call made through ContextGate.

What you get with GameDev.net and ContextGate

• Your AI apps can use GameDev.netClaude, Cursor, ChatGPT and other AI apps reach GameDev.net through the one ContextGate connection you add to them.
• You choose which tools they can useSwitch off any GameDev.net tool you don't want used. It's hidden from your AI apps and refused if called.
• Every call is checked and recordedYour policies check each call (for example, personal data is hidden and secrets are blocked), and Activity keeps a record of it.

ContextGate sees only the tool calls that go through it, not your AI app's built-in tools or your chats.

GameDev.net tools

Examples of what your AI apps can do in GameDev.net. You'll see the exact list of tools after you connect it.

• search_siteUnified full-text search across all public GameDev.net content — forum discussions, tutorials, blogs, projects, portfolios, and game-industry news. Filter to specific kinds with content_types (e.g. ["forum_topic","forum_post"] for forums, or ["news","news_item"] for news) and order by relevance or date. Returns titles, URLs, excerpts, authors, and ids for follow-up with get_content.
• get_threadFetch one GameDev.net forum thread with its posts (plain text), including which reply is the accepted answer.
• get_contentFetch the full public text of a specific item (tutorial, blog, news, project, portfolio, ShaderLab project, forum topic, canonical answer, or thread digest) using the content_type + id from a search result. Use this to ground deeply after a search. For news_item (aggregated news) this returns GameDev.net's own AI summary and enrichment with a citation link, not the source's full article text.
• list_recentList the most recent GameDev.net content of a given kind. Useful for "what is new" / roundup queries. Includes the curated canonical answers and "best of" thread digests.
• search_shadersSearch public, published ShaderLab projects with structured runtime, topic, difficulty, license, and explanation filters.
• get_shader_projectFetch one public, published ShaderLab project as structured passes, channel bindings, parameters, annotations, provenance, and confirmed techniques. Source defaults to 20,000 characters and can be bounded up to 100,000.
• list_shader_topicsList the human-curated ShaderLab topic taxonomy with optional public project counts and representative examples.
• get_shader_portability_reportRun ShaderLab deterministic E1 portability analysis for a public project and optional three.js, Godot, Unity, or WebGL target.
• list_trending_contentWhat is currently trending in game-industry news on GameDev.net. mode="stories" (default) returns deduplicated multi-source story clusters (with aggregated tags, source count, and when the story broke/last updated — use get_story for the full timeline); mode="items" returns individual trending articles. Each result carries GameDev.net's owned AI summary and a source citation. Optionally filter by
• get_storyFetch one story cluster: its AI summary and key facts, plus a source-by-source timeline of every article covering the story (each with its source and a citation link). Good for "how did this story develop / who reported it".